The Transformative Nature of the Last Utopia – Anuscheh Farahat

Human rights possess a universal claim to validity and are gaining ground around the world. But for how much longer?

Since the French Revolution and its demands for liberté, egalité and fraternité, history has been shaped by human rights. The struggle for their validity, expansion, and implementation was and is a guiding principle of many revolutions and political conflicts around the world. Human rights have managed to produce an effective instrument for limiting state power. They have shifted the autonomy of individuals into the spotlight of political action and the legitimation of power. Finally, they have provided essential impulses for collective rights, the protection of minorities, and social issues. We can therefore safely say that the human rights revolution is the greatest legal revolution of all times.

Are human rights truly universal, or rather a product of European, western thinking with no claim to universality?

During the second half of the twentieth century, human rights came to be regarded by many as the ‘last utopia’ in light of the failure of other great ideologies. Due to the success of international courts and organisations, human rights have contained the sovereignty of nation-states and thereby fundamentally transformed them. In doing so, human rights have once again proved their truly revolutionary power and also managed to constrain the potential for conflict that has always been inherent in nation-states. For many years, these developments seemed irreversible. But is this still true today? Are human rights truly universal, or rather a product of European, western thinking with no claim to universality? How do human rights counter private or economic power and new forms of structural violence? What value do human rights have in the so-called ‘West’ in this time of rising right-wing populism?

Human rights need to be reaffirmed over and over again

No matter how significant the human rights revolution may be, its success is more fragile and coincidental than many had hoped. And yet, this revolution is irreversible. The knowledge about its potential and its claim to validity cannot be undone. But its transformative character is not guaranteed – the success of human rights depends on whether we manage to reaffirm them in daily life and in the law, over and over again. That also means that we need to find answers to the question of how to overcome these new challenges. A current debate within legal studies revolves around the issue of how human rights can be used to deal with the problems of social inequality and structural exclusion. Does that require a greater focus on socially based human rights?

Human rights in times of populism

A second issue confronting human rights is the ever-increasing number of refugees around the world. Currently, the protection of refugees is based exclusively on the individual’s right to protection against individual states. Current debates on this topic focus on how the provision of human-rights-based protection could be improved through the adoption of co-operative measures between states. Finally, a perennial issue when it comes to protecting human rights is the relationship between democratic self-determination and human rights, especially at the international political level. In times of increasing populism, more and more states are trying to withdraw from human rights obligations by pointing to the right to democratic self-determination. If human rights are going to continue to be effectively protected under these conditions, then we need to come up with new forms of dialogue and new procedures for implementing human rights. It’s the only way we can continue to maintain their fundamental claim to validity. Anuscheh Farahat is a legal scholar and researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt. She joined the Junge Akademie in 2016.